A Defiant Ryan Adams Isn’t Sorry Anymore – He’s Pissed.

Earlier this month, I sat down over Zoom with Ryan Adams for an interview to preview his show at the Shubert Theatre in Boston tonight. It was to be part of my ongoing 617 Q&A series with Vanyaland, the name inspired by the Boston area code, where I run through six questions, ask the subject for one recommendation, and end it with them listing seven of something tailored just to them.

Everyone truly seems to enjoy it, from comedians to actors to musicians, because it’s an interview device that doesn’t feel too gimmicky, shakes up the traditional format, and has the person thinking about more than just the project they’re shilling. It’s made for some fun revelations, like when Slayer guitarist Kerry King admitted he knows the words to any song off Michael Jackson’s Thriller or that the woman who was supposed to sing “Blister in the Sun” by Violent Femmes joined a cult and moved to Canada, or how Police co-founder Andy Summers thinks Paul McCartney’s photography is “fucking terrible.”

Sometimes though, we run out of time. Many artists are kept on a somewhat tight schedule, which is usually ok because I’ve only got sixish questions, then the recommendation and the listing. And if we’re against the clock, I tell them it’s fine to have their publicist or management send over the last part. Which is what happened with Ryan Adams.

Adams, you may recall, was the subject of a damning 2019 New York Times piece that accused him of being emotionally abusive and manipulative towards seven women, enticing some by offering to support their musical careers, only to attempt to sabotage them when he was spurned. Among them were indie-darling Phoebe Bridgers and Nashville native Courtney Jaye. The unequal power dynamic allegations came at the height of the #MeToo movement and sent the singer/songwriter spiraling.

First, he defended himself, saying, “The picture that this article paints is upsettingly inaccurate. Some of its details are misrepresented; some are exaggerated; some are outright false.” That summer, dropped by his record label and having lost endorsement deals, he took to social media and was much more contrite. He said he “tried my best to be open and accountable,” punctuating the missive with “Believe Women. Believe Truth.”

Unfortunately, that turned out to be smoke and mirrors when screenshots leaked of a text exchange between Adams and his then-manager where the singer told her, “I’m not interested in this healing crap. I want a plan and I want to work. That’s it.”  

A year and a half later, in July 2020, Adams penned an apology that ran in the UK Daily Mail tabloid. He straight up said, “This time it is different,” conceding it wasn’t the same “bullshit apology” as before and that he had even gotten sober this time around.

***

It was a slow roll back, expectedly, as at one point during the whole mess, an FBI investigation had been opened into whether Adams had committed a crime by engaging an underage fan in sexually explicit conversations online. But behind the scenes, the music was still coming, and live shows were planned. January 2021 saw the FBI clear him of any criminal conduct – something that didn’t receive anywhere near the media coverage as when the investigation began.

That August, Adams confessed to Los Angeles Magazine that he was still trying to pick up the pieces in a lengthy profile feature. Many who were closest to him disappeared when he needed them most, leaving him feeling alone and riddled with anxiety. “I felt like they were asking me to die,” he said of those calling for his head in the wake of the charges.

Finally, Adams returned to the stage in 2022 in a major way, performing at a sold-out Carnegie Hall in New York City. He released a bunch of albums that year – six in total – and revved up the touring engine again, where audiences filled venues, seemingly without hesitation. And when he started off this year by dropping five full-length releases the minute the clock struck January 1, it appeared all was back to normal. The mostly positive response serves almost as an answer to whether people are able to separate the artist from the art.

According to Adams today, there’s nothing to separate. The reason we didn’t get to the seven of our 617 is that when I asked if his creativity was in any way stymied by all that had happened over the past couple of years, he went on a nearly 40-minute, scatterbrained, stream-of-consciousness rant. I didn’t feel he was negative toward me in any way – even though he already casually made his disdain for music journalists known. Instead, he was fuming over the whole thing happening and that he was singled out in the first place .

“Somebody tried to compare me to Harvey Weinstein, and I was like, ‘I’m sorry, I was pursued by all of those women.’ I was a good-looking, funny, ridiculous, joyful off-the-wall person, but I definitely wasn’t a person that was walking around from show to show like, spreading doom.”

Already late for our conversation by more than a half hour, Adams was likely behind in general that day, and soon his manager started pinging him to let him know the next interview was waiting. I told him the seven of the 617 Q&A I was looking for and said he could just have someone on his team send back the answers. He enthusiastically said he would.

Weeks went by with no response when I followed up via email, other than from a publicist who was clearly trying to get an answer from management but having the same amount of luck as me. As we got closer to the scheduled publish date, I let the team know if I didn’t hear back, I was going to have to kill the piece.

I never heard back. The 617 Q&A was cut. Now I have an interview without a home. The number of times that’s happened to me I can count on one hand. There are few things more frustrating than having sat down with someone for any period of note and not getting to publish the highlights of the exchange. So that’s what this post is about.

“Okay, so when I went through my New York Times, their ceaseless, never-ending campaign to create war between people…I mean, they’ve done some good, but certainly they’ve done some pretty horrible things to artists and it’s a ceaseless process. And nobody sort of looks at the New York Times and says, ‘Oh, they were actually going out of business and luckily they got into this culture war.’

I’ve always said, I have a sister and my mother, and my grandmother all raised me. And so, I mean, I was raised by strong-willed women, and I have always believed that this day needed to come…But for context, for anyone that doesn’t know and thinks that I’m just some kind of lecherous, horrible person…

You know, there’s this whole thing where they say, ‘Believe All Women.’ Well, what about, ‘You mischaracterized what I said about him, and I never met him and that never happened. And you took what I said out of context.’ Or the fact that, like, I’ve been vetted, I’ve been vetted by the United States government. What more do you need? Also, I’m a dad. I have an almost 4-year-old. I’m almost 50. I just kind of look at all this stuff and think, one thing that people don’t know is my brother was sick, and he was going in and out of comas for the entire time I was on the [2017] Prisoner tour.

“I think if you look at an article it says, ‘I didn’t have an acoustic guitar to go on tour with, so he loaned me one, but we didn’t sleep together.’ I just look at that and go, ‘Well, God, how horrible of me, what’s next? Am I going to gift this person for Christmas like a Cormac McCarthy novel?’ [laughs] What’s the problem there?”

***

“I’m hotel phobic, so I don’t stay in hotels. So, the thing about me answering the door naked in a hotel with a robe from the hotel on? I’m a hypochondriac as well, I would never let one of those…who knows where that thing has been or rubbed themselves on that? And also hotels really disturb me. We have to route tours so we can find places for the tour bus where it can stay on. Because I stay on the bus and I just use the facilities at the venue.

“I’d just come out of a seven-year marriage, and I had a very public divorce [in 2016], but I had never said anything about my divorce. But every week I go to the grocery store, my mom is, like, humiliated because my ex-wife, who we had an agreed separation, is going like, ‘The hell of my marriage.’ And I’d be like, ‘What are you talking about? [louder] What you talking about?’ We lived in a $4 million home with a live-in cook and housekeeper, and we had seven rescue animals.

And the only thing I didn’t do is I didn’t want to work on a record with her because frankly, even for me, I wouldn’t want to hear that record. The first thing I would think that somebody would say is, ‘I could tell that this is a record that he hasn’t written, or that wasn’t written by her.’

I never did one article about my ex-wife. I never did one thing. And trust me, I got offered tons of money and opportunities. But having my sister or my mother have to go to the grocery store every week and look at People magazine and all these magazines where ‘It was an endless barrage of…’ That’s true narcissism, that’s acute narcissism to go seven-and-a-half years and really try and rescue seven animals and make a life of memories. But then to act like it was all this burning horror, it completely contradicts everything that she said before.

And in a lot of ways, I’ve always just been the same guy, like, I wake up and I want to make music. And when you’re married to somebody that doesn’t want to do that, it’s like you go, ‘Well, this is who I was when you met me.’ You know what I mean? It’s like, ‘Well, the first time you ever saw me, I was on stage and I was, like, playing a two-hour show, two-and-a-half-hour show.’ And then the first time we ever hung out, I recorded seven demos at this person’s, my ex-wife’s house in California.

What kind of person gets married for seven-and-a-half years because they don’t believe in love? And also, I came from hardcore punk rock and the person I married is the farthest thing from that. So, I like to think that I gambled pretty hard at the love table.

“I think if you want to know more about why that article was written and who wrote it, the person that wrote it was actually writing hate blog stuff about me since the ‘00s, wrote a negative review of my art show where I raised over $30,000 for The Bowery Mission in New York City and basically called my art trash.

A year and a half before the article came out, that same journalist was saying, ‘Someone’s in trouble, but I’m not going to say who.’ And then put a picture of words on a page and then my name in a highlight. And then would say, ‘List one of the women in there and say, ‘So-and-so is the GOAT,’ and clearly had a crush on the person.

“Jim DeRogatis is the Jabba the Hutt of music criticism. A guy that thinks he’s Lenny Bruce, but a guy that Lenny Bruce probably would’ve beat his ass.

Jim DeRogatis used to come to my shows in Chicago and I’d play two nights in Chicago and all my fans would be going nuts. And then he would write two really terrible reviews. And a very famous thing happened before social media where I called him and said, ‘Stop coming to my concerts. You’re taking a seat in my sold-out shows that a fan can’t get because you just want to come and bag on it.’ And I’m like, ‘We get it. You’re a drummer in a really bad Wire cover band. And honestly, you’re one of the worst journalists I’ve ever read in my life.’

His book, Let It Blurt, is honestly…people should send, instead of using those Duraflames, just send Jim DeRogatis’s book to people if they have a fireplace at Christmas. He sucks. It’s like the guy went on Conan O’Brien for his new show with his other guy [music critic Greg Kot] and basically said that the Grateful Dead were a couple of guys dicking around on guitar for four hours a night. That was his explanation of the Grateful Dead. Are you kidding me?”

I actually called Jim DeRogatis out in an article a number of years ago.

“And the funny thing is, for a guy that lost his brother that was just trying to keep my head above water, every single one of those people that said, ‘I love you. If there’s anything I could do for you, let me know. I know you’re going through it.’ And then six months later for them to do that…and paint me as some lecherous human is horrifying, horrifying.

And I’ve been lucky. I’ve been able to move forward in my life and I don’t do interviews for this main reason is that this topic comes up and it’s been six years and it’s like I’ve made, what, over 10 records since then? So, it’s like, this isn’t part of my life. The part of my life where that part existed is I got in the ring with this, and somebody handed me a Darth Vader helmet and they wanted me to put it on. They wanted me to become the bad person that they were creating. And I refused to put that helmet on. And I refused to let my heart become brittle.”

***

“And now I get up just like I’ve always done every day, and I do something creative every day. I’m writing my book, I’m making drawings, I’m writing songs, I’m making records. If it did anything, it knocked a couple of those really greasy, bad Hollywood types off of my back. Sometimes it isn’t the person that’s being assailed in an article, sometimes it isn’t the person that the mob or hunting, it’s the mob. You just have to look at it…you have to zoom out and look at it from a deeper perspective. When we’re 75 or 80 years old, are we going to say that they should cancel all the Fleetwood Mac records because they slept with each other? Or had romantic affairs that are nobody’s business? I mean, come on.

The time that people want to say that I was a letch or a lothario or a scoundrel. I was never a scoundrel. I regret not holding onto one relationship that got away from me. But that’s because the other people, the whisper group of women who were just, ‘Oh, he said he wanted to get married to me too.’ I didn’t say I wanted to marry you. I said, ‘I don’t want to be in a relationship that couldn’t ever end up in marriage.’ I don’t want to be in a senseless relationship.

That’s not the kind of actions of a guy that’s a horrible person. But I think there are bad people in music and some of them are the people that are causing these rifts and taking this power and turning it into craziness. It’s not just the terrible awful stories you hear about stuff that happens. It’s also the idea of going, ‘Oh, we can remove that person and replace all that with this other person.’

I don’t have any more time to waste on all that stuff, and I just hope everybody is okay. And I don’t know whether people know this, but some of the people involved, they’re now in lawsuits, because they did the same thing to other people and vilified other people unfairly. I’m glad I’m not involved in that. I don’t want to spend another day of my life thinking about it.

“And if anything, I am still here and losing my brother and then having what happened to me where they took away my only one thing, my one passion: music. My life. My voice. Taking that away from me…I survived that. Nobody went, ‘Oh, it turns out we might’ve been wrong about him…’ All evidence of the contrary.

They’re ashamed. They’re ashamed. They’re ashamed.

I’m never going to allow someone to trick me into living on their clock, waiting for them to come to terms with their shame. They can wake up and look themselves in the mirror every day and try to figure out why they were hungry for monsters. Because typically people who are hungry for monsters, they already see the monster every morning in the mirror and they’ll do anything they can to turn it into somebody else.

“They have moved beyond it. We’re the people in this conversation, we aren’t. The last [interview] I just had wasn’t neither, which is interesting, but I don’t know why it’s coming up now. And I suspect it’s because there’s another cycle of people in music that obviously that chasm has opened again, but I don’t belong to that chasm. And yeah, my fans have moved on from this stuff.

“But I mean, I’ve released 33 records, and I’ve suffered from lifelong, almost debilitating depression. And I suffer from a disease called Meniere’s disease, which is a vestibular disease, and a lot of people are unfamiliar with, but you basically are hurt all the time. You ache and you’re dizzy and sometimes you’re too dizzy to function. And I think that maybe my depression might’ve stemmed from that.

“I’ll just remind people, if you’re ever in a bad mood, and you catch yourself? If you’re hungry, angry, lonely or tired? For us in recovery or with severe depression issues, we call that ‘HALT.’ I want to remind everybody, go and get, if you have a vinyl record player or a cassette record player or you just have a streaming service and a little Bluetooth, if you feel that way, make yourself a sandwich and put on Kiss Alive or Kiss Alive II. You know what I mean? If you wanted the best, you could get the best.

They’re still out there. I just saw them, and they destroyed the Hollywood Bowl and they were really playing their instruments. The only time they weren’t is when Paul was flying over the audience, and you got to give it to the guy. He flew over the whole audience. And so, if somebody else had to pick up the guitar part, so be it. But I watched him play wrong notes. So…”